Time Heals All Wounds – William Shakespeare
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On – Samuel Beckett
See the four
Fallen graves under the winnowing porch
Of the quadri-plex lived in while studying
Rhyme, reason, stage directions, and
The unmistakable blip-blip-bleep-bloop.
All the woeful symmetries that exist
Solely to be found.
Looking for storm windows, not 19th century graves
But that did not stop the creation
Of their stories upon finding them character-less,
Captive and without tale.
So many fish in the sea, it is said…
The blips and bloops and bleeps emanated,
Like the clips and clicks and glycerin chinks
Of the many emptied glasses, from forms
Of tortured indulgence, the scritch and scratch
Of the union of lead and wood
And the hearty heavy-handed constant erasure
Of the Smith & Corona’s delete key, always
Hard at work.
Forward, forward,
Forward, back,
Allowing the symmetries the extra step
To always imagine life a little
Further ahead. Always wrong,
But firmly held,
To the squanderous notion
Of Journey over Destination.
Named the four graves, these vestibules for
The family’s children, after the four failed attempts
At permanent romance endured while living
In the house of their once murderous father.
(Researched, or
Imagined it was,
Found molded records of furied
Attempt at survival:
He killed four of his nine children
When the yellow plague struck Memphis in the 1870’s
In an effort to spread the stop of the disease.
The tried-and-true
Sacrifice-of-the-few
For the greater-good-of-the-whole
Theory.)
The first grave was called Lust, as attraction only
Drove the steam of the union;
Gave the second the dawdling
Moniker of Sloth as it was the incapacity to move
Forward that gave more than the one night
Together deserved much less the fourteen months
Endured; breaking expectations,
Termed the third
Grace, with all of the double-sided innuendo
That grace can imply, she of the artful memory
Meant for shorter spurts of time than could be bridged
By desire or architectural techniques.
After the fourth one threatened to kill me,
It would have been easy to name
Her holy the death-head, but opted to call
Her Joy instead, as every day without her, even
Under the threat of certain doom, was better
Than one more second with her. She,
Incidentally, obviously, felt the same way.
It’s so easy and right
To laugh off some of Shakespeare these days –
His universalism does not account
For the heresies our day-to-days have become,
Are still in the becoming stages.
I don’t know what it is
But I know that finding it
Is better than seeking it.
Seek and ye shall find
Only works if you don’t know
What you are looking for
And only if you are indifferent
To what you find.
Practicing, again, the fine art
Of erasure again, the removal of
As many I’s and We’s
And Wills and Will nots
As passes for understanding,
The erasing of the soul, again,
With every stroke of the pen.
Made-up
Stories are never as overgrown as the real thing -
He ended up losing three more children,
His wife and his mind before abandoning survival
Theory.
It was all over soon, so soon, too soon to count
The shovels, the planks, the tiny pieces of mortar
That went in to the building of his house,
The same materials that we grasp for every day,
Taking three steps forward for every
One we push back into the sea.
© 2007/12 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved
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